Homewood officials and local environmental activists aired conflicting views at the village board meeting Tuesday, March 11, about how to characterize the water quality in a small pond on the northwest corner of Izaak Walton Preserve.
The pond in question is part of the Prairie Lakes system. which was created and functions as stormwater retention basins to reduce flooding.
As part of an announcement posted Monday, March 10, that the village would seek a consultant to further study water quality in the pond, Homewood officials cited a conversation with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and indicated the water is not toxic according to its standards.
Both sides acknowledge that a study conducted in 2023 found evidence of harmful hydrocarbons in the water while investigating an oily sheen that appears at an outfall where stormwater runoff enters the pond. The conflict appears to be focused on what the results of that study mean in terms of the risk the substances pose to the environment.
During the public comment portion of the board meeting, two members of South Suburbs for Greenspace, David Sacks and Liz Varmecky, pushed back on that claim. Varmecky is running for a seat on the Board of Trustees in the April 1 election.
pond water at the March 11 Homewood Board of Trustees meeting to underscore
his point about the quality of the water. (Eric Crump/H-F Chronicle)
“The village is just spreading disinformation and science denialism in the face of extremely clear evidence that there are toxic chemicals and known carcinogens (in the pond),” Sacks said. He displayed a jar half full of water he said he took from the pond and invited board members to wash their hands in it.
He read a section of an IEPA memo that noted one substance, fluoranthene, was “above the acute and chronic water quality standards.” A table in the memo flagged fluoranthene for further investigation.
“Your residents fish in this water. Their dogs play in this water. Migratory birds and other wildlife make their home in this water,” he said.
Varmecky has spoken at board meetings several times in recent months, urging the village to take immediate action to stop the leaching of toxins into the pond. The village in the past has maintained a boom where water enters the pond, but activists have asserted it is inadequate.
At the March 11 meeting, Varmecky reiterated her push for immediate action, noting that the village started addressing the problem in the fall of 2024 after activists went public with the issue. She said a resident made a complaint to the IEPA in 2022.
She also took issue with the portion of the village notice that urged residents to be cautious about claims of toxic pollution in the pond.
“There are no claims of toxicity. There is data showing toxicity,” she said. “The community and the wildlife at Isaac Walton deserves better.”
Village Manager Napoleon Haney responded to defend the village’s stance. He said the village reached out to IEPA to get guidance from the most authoritive agency in the state on environmental issues.
He also noted the village has partnered with the Izaak Walton organization to investigate the problem, sharing the costs of the initial study.
That 2023 study, conducted by Bryan Environmental Consulting of Homewood, was preliminary to a more thorough investigation, which the village and Izaak Walton are pursuing.
The village issued a request for qualifications to identify a consultant who can conduct further and more detailed tests and assessment of the water quality in the whole Prairie Lakes system. The pond is connected to the larger body of water.
The deadline for responses to the RFQ was March 28, and Haney said he expected the village board would consider next steps sometime in April.
Patricia Bryan agreed that the study her company conducted was preliminary and not designed to definitively answer questions about the water quality in the pond. The scope was limited, with only a few samples of water and sediment taken near two outfalls.
She confirmed that some of the substances found in the samples are considered carcinogens. She noted, though, that a definitive conclusion was difficult to reach not only because of the study’s limited scope but because no applicable local standards exist for the precise situation found at the pond.
To provide some comparable benchmarks for assessing the data, her report borrowed standards from New York, Wisconsin and another EPA region. She said the study found a number of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, including fluoranthene, that were above the borrowed standards. Some of the standards were for groundwater rather than sediment and surface water, which is what the samples were from.
“They’re guidance maybe, but they don’t really apply,” she said. “We did apply numbers that IEPA has for soil and groundwater, and this was surface water, it was sediment, not soil. There’s a fine difference there. There weren’t applicable standards, so we used things that we could just get a kind of a framework for, ‘Is this bad or good?'”
She said that while the amounts of hydrocarbons found did exceed some of the standards used, the levels were not very high.
“Here in the Chicago area, we have these compounds detected all over the place at similar levels that are not really all that high, but they exceed standards,” she said. A possible source of the substances can be fire debris.
Until the village and Izaak Walton are able to commission a more in-depth study, it appears there is evidence of toxic substances in the pond but no clear conclusion about how dangerous they are or whether and how to mitigate the problem.
Related stories:
- Homewood officials say Izaak Walton pond not toxic, post RFQ for assessing water quality (March 11, 2025)
- Homewood enlists state help after local environmentalists raise alarm over toxins in Izaak Walton pond (Oct. 23, 2024)
